Simon Owens writes a Substack newsletter on media business, covering creators, podcasts, newsletters and publisher strategy through interviews and case studies.
Commenters call his paywalled case studies of media entrepreneurs especially good, and link him for examples such as a local newsletter with high paid conversion.
You typically won't see rising ad revenues during a recession. When times are hard, or look like they could get hard, advertising is the first thing cut. Its a well established pattern. Eg, from https://www.createwithnova.com/blog/the-history-of-advertising-in-a-recession :
> After the last recession in 2008, the US ad market declined by 13%. Newspaper ad spend fell 27%, radio spend 22%, magazine spend 18%, outdoor spend 11%, TV spend 5% and digital 2%.
And yes, it happened this time too. From https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-advertising-recession-is-definitely :
> Digiday published a recent overview of media earnings reports, and while earnings overall were a mixed bag, nearly every single company reported a significant dip in advertising revenue:
> Publishers reported declines in digital ad revenue from about 9% to 30% — worse than the 3% to 27% drop in ad revenue year over year reported for the fourth quarter of 2022. Executives continued to cite macroeconomic conditions and a soft ad market as major challenges to their businesses.
I recently came across The Game Discoverer Newsletter, which seems to be about 100x more insightful and data rich than boilerplate journalism like Kotaku. They also have some other interesting data tools for game developers.
More broadly, I'm not sure general "journalism" really has a bright future outside of the big names that can field huge advertising budgets. I'm more convinced that niche sites should specialize on a specific topic and figure out a use-case that makes it worth subscribing to from a business perspective, not an ideological one.
Links:
1. A good overview post: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/how-the-gamediscoverco-newsletter
2. https://newsletter.gamediscover.co
3. https://gamediscover.co
Congrats, that's awesome! Simon Owens has many articles about this – paywalled, ironically, but worth it IMO, and you could just pay for a month and then cancel. His case studies based on interviews with media entrepreneurs are especially good.
Link: https://simonowens.substack.com/archive?sort=new
We have this also. https://coppellchronicle.substack.com/
Article about it: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/this-local-newsletter-covering-a
40%+ conversion rate on substack.